Tech Anthropologist Works to Save Dying Comanche Language

The language of the Comanche people, a lifeline of its culture, is fading fast.

Its muted vowels and sapient cadence once echoed throughout the fenceless grasslands of the South Plains, but today it can muster barely a whisper.

That’s why Texas Tech anthropologist Jeff Williams and a handful of other researchers have devised a plan that could help save Comanche from confinement in history books.

With a recent $215,000 two-year grant from the Administration for Native Americans, they’ll shoulder the task on modern technology and a new generation of Comanche students eager to learn their ancestral tongue.

“Its important for any language to have its say, to be documented,” Williams said. “It’s interesting for Comanche because it rose to dominance on the South Plains so quickly, then to have it so quickly go into a state of complete demise.”